This is a quick wrap-up entry for Plasma Bug Days which was held over the last two days. First, we accomplished a lot. I mean a lot. The first goal was to drop into third place on the Weekly Bug Report. We accomplished that on the first day and so moved onto another goal suggested by one of the participants: have fewer reports open than we did six months ago. We also accomplished that. Now we have a new goal: break 1000. We're just 120 reports away from that goal right now.

Today has been relatively slow going as it isn't an official Bug Day so just a few showed up to do bug triage today. Quite promisingly, though, some people from the Bug Days showed up today again. I do hope all of them continue to be involved and help with the bug wrangling as their efforts were just fantastic this weekend.

I also set about to fix some of the older and more annoying issues in some of the more commonly used parts of Plasma ...read more...

It's that time of year again, KDE is nearing a new release day and it's time for translators to work on the making sure that new software/features are properly translated so that the thousands of KDE users can enjoy it in their native language.

Unfortunately translators come and go and KDE software continues to grow and grow, meaning that sometimes some languages fall below the line of what we consider an acceptable amount of translations for them to be shipped with the KDE releases.

For this 4.8 cycle this is the list of languages that was in 4.7 and if the release was today would not be released: Arabic, Bulgarian, Galician, Hebrew, Irish Gaelic, Indonesian, Japanese, Kannada, Latvian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Uyghur and Walloon

Obviously this does not mean that they will not released with KDE since each translation team has a different work schedule and some of them only work when really close to a release, but if you are a user enjoying KDE on one of the above languages you should think on volunteering to ...read more...

Scott Lowe - Examining VXLAN - It’s taken me far too long to write this post, that’s for sure. Since the announcement of VXLAN at VMworld earlier in the year, I’ve been searching for additional information on these questions: “What is VXLAN? How does it fit into the broader networking landscape? Why did we need a new standard?”

Cormac Hogan - Upgraded VMFS-5: Automatic Partition Format Change - By now, regular readers of this blog will be aware that VMFS-5 supports a single extent volume size of 64TB. In an earlier post, I mentioned that newly created VMFS-5 partitions use a GUID Partition Format, GPT. This partition format allows for the creation of large partition sizes to cater for the new single extent 64TB VMFS-5 volume.

Today was the first of two Plasma Bug Days we're hosting this week in #plasma on irc.freenode.net. It started at noon UTC and people started rolling in. With the help of Ann Marie and Marco, we got the volunteer bug hunters up to speed and working with a high degree of effectivity.

So far (and we're not yet done for the day!) we've closed 62 reports. There were a number of fixes applied for 4.8 (and some for the upcoming 4.7.4 as well) as a result, and duplicates or already fixed bugs were also being caught. A good number of crashers were identified and fixed, and one vastly annoying bug where a panel would mutate and take over the whole screen when the screen count changed was also killed. That's pretty decent for a day's effort.

Big thanks and kudos to all those who participated so far, including asraniel, thijs, BrummbQ, mck182, emilsedgh, mrrub and Adaptee. (Hope I didn't miss anyone, if I did: mea culpa! and let me know :)

Last weekend I went back to the beautiful city of Toulouse for Capitole du Libre, a free software event made of three co-hosted events: Akademy FR, Ubuntu Party and Drupal Camp. It was great to meet the usual gang of Toulibre KDE people and put faces on people I only knew from #kde-fr, the friendly French-speaking Freenode IRC channel. We even had Aleix Pol, of KDevelop and KAlgebra fame, coming from Barcelona to help us.

Saturday

Saturday, was the busiest day: we had a KDE booth and ran two conference tracks: users and contributors.

Being co-hosted with the Ubuntu Party brought in a different population from previous KDE Release Parties. We had nice conversations on the KDE booth with Ubuntu users who heard about KDE but did not really know what it looked like or even what it really was. We did our best to sell our beautiful products. The Plasma Active powered Wetab tablet made a very good impression. It is interesting ...read more...

We’re currently discussing how to give a good visual indicator to users of Marble Touch where their current GPS position is (once it moves outside the visible region of the map). I created a video that shows two possible approaches: The first one (sticky indicator) shows the indicator on the bottom right of the screen and an arrow to point towards it. The second one (moving indicator) also moves the indicator to the nearest border of the screen. Please take a look at the video comparing both and add your comments.

Here are some things to consider:

The sticky indicator has the advantage of a predictable location. Look at the bottom right corner of the map to see the distance to the current position and in which direction it is. A disadvantage is that the distance is measured to the bottom right corner, which is not always intuitive (measuring to the center can be as confusing though). Likewise it’s confusing two ...read more...

As of last Wednesday, VMware Fusion 4.1.1 is available for download or via “Check for updates” inside the application itself. The Fusion Team blog links to a useful KB article that Snow Leopard and Leopard users should consult before upgrading. Read more on blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion

Our Fusion team is also driving a three-day cyber-Monday sale and offering Fusion at a 30% discount. The offer is valid until midnight Pacific time today, so go get the special offer link off facebook.com/vmwarefusion

Today is the last day of the three-day cyber-Monday sale on VMware Workstation 8. Until midnight Pacific time today, you can snag your own copy of Workstation at 30% off. With VMware Workstation you can move to the internal cloud, build and test your VMs locally, then drag and drop them to vSphere when you’re ready. Share VMs with your team by running Workstation as a server, connect to vSphere and vCenter to access remote VMs, ...read more...

In today's part we'll have a look at an application, that I've (again) grown so used to, that I consider it part of the Workspace itself - KSnapshot.

I remember doing screenshots on my old Win XP machine - press the print screen key, open up MS Paint, paste the image there and save. That's so last-century. I don't know how it works these days in Win7, but feel free to let me know below in the comments. OS X went one step further - after you press some magic key combo (which I could never remember), the image is saved on your desktop. But the fearless KDE developers went even further.

After you press the print screen key, the KSnapshot pops up with little window and your screenshot in it. From here you can either save the image to a format and place of your own liking (clever automatic file numbering included). However if you don't like the screenshot you just took, ...read more...

KDE Telepathy is a suite of applications which together form an instant-messaging client allowing you to talk on Jabber, Gmail, Facebookm, MSN and much more. KDE Telepathy stands out from previous instant messaging clients by being able to integrate into the KDE workspace and plasma, as well as being able to be used like a traditional IM application.

This release features:

KWallet integration for storing of passwords

A plasmoid for instant access to a contact

Ability to set your status to the currently playing track from Amarok, Clementine or any other mpris2-compatiable player

Sprints

The whole team met at the Woshibon 2 sprint in Cambridge, UK (14th-18th September). This sprint was sponsored by both the KDE e.V and Collabora and allowed us to not only sort out many of the details in making this release, but planning out more long term ...read more...

It was about two years before school when for the first time I saw “Computers” in my father’s working place. When I was in the 1st year of my high school, I get the chance of playing games on the computer and one year after that I get some lessons about computer and MS DOS.

I can say those event's changed my life completely as I leaved my first university after 2 years of studying “Material Engineering – Ceramic Field” and went to the new university for studying “Computer – IT Field” and later on one of my professors invited me to his company and from then my IT career started.

How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2011 vExpert?

I started using VMware products “VMware Workstation 6.x” and “VMware Server 1.x” before I'm moving to the new university for studying ...read more...

It may seem obvious but eating our own dog food can definitely be good for your project's condition. Especially when it is maturing over time. How many testers can we have and how many personas for your user-centered design can we define and maintain? Usually just a few with the actual resources. Is only fulfilling needs of more or less fictional actors focusing on few use cases a good direction? Or does it put our vigilance to sleep?

Well, I am convinced you and your co-workers can be good actors if you actually start using your software more.

In the CSS2 presentation I published above there are only few but probably telling examples of what features of Calligra we can start using more in the project and how. There also a 'why'. Never force using apps if there are better (or good enough) tools already in place. Own dog food consumption can also be a risky business if the usage feels ...read more...

Mmmm, after the jerk-flavored roasted turkey for Thanksgiving dinner (with an amazing Paula Dean corn casserole) I got some excellent coding mojo. That is, of course, after the tryptophan wore off. Then I realized that it has been over 6 months since the last bug fix release and it kinda seemed like it was about time to get these fixes I’ve worked on over the last few months more widely distributed. So I tagged Bangarang 2.1 beta last night.

There was once a 2.1 target features list, but as I’ve realized over the last few months, with just myself as the main developer, it just makes sense to work on whatever motivates me, when I’m motivated to work on it. I’ll do target features and and more fixed release schedules if the number of contributors grow. Fun is my biggest motivation and it’s gotten quite a bit done thus far. And yes, I do enjoy knocking out bugs as much as I enjoy adding features.

KBibTeX is a BibTeX editor for KDE to edit bibliographies used with LaTeX. Features include comfortable input masks, starting Web queries , and exporting to PDF, PostScript, RTF, and XML/HTML. As KBibTeX is using KDE's KParts technology, it can be embedded into Kile or Konqueror.

First of all I arrived to Toulouse where Akademy-fr is going to happen. I’m really happy of being part of this first (I hope of many) Akademy-fr edition.

Secondly, KAlgebra has been accepted to the OVI store. As far as I know, it’s the first (I hope of many, again ) application bundling kde libs in it. So all N9* users can install it without ugly tricks! o/